About the author

My name is Donovan Brown and I am a Principal DevOps Manager with Microsoft with a background in application development. I also run one of the Nation’s fastest growing online registration sites for motorsports events DLBRacing.com. When I am not writing software I race cars for fun. DLBRacing.com has given me the opportunity to combine my two passions writing software and racing cars.

So, I am taking my first vacation in four years and I thought there would be no better time to move LoECDA.com to K8S!

In the Container Orchestration wars, I think Kubernetes is leading by a large margin. It seems to be what all the cool kids are doing. I believe the best way to learn something is to use it. So, I decided to move LoECDA.com to K8S.

My team’s website is .NET Core running inside of a Linux container. Before this weekend we were using the Docker support built inside of App Service. This is a very easy way to get introduced to Docker. You do not have to spin up your own host or deploy a cluster. This is a great solution for a single image application. We felt very comfortable with our CI/CD flow into App Service and wanted to explore other options in Azure. We decided to use Kubernetes on Azure Container Service (ACS).

I still have a lot to learn but with a single cluster I safely deployed both my Dev and Production sites. Moving to K8S dropped our deployment time to 11 seconds.

Deploying a cluster with ACS is very easy and when you are done you can use Kubectl locally or in the Azure Cloud Shell to manage your cluster. You also have access to the Kubernetes dashboard as you would with every Kubernetes cluster.

Deploying to Kubernetes with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) was so easy I thought I had done something wrong. LOL

All the tasks you need to build and push an image to a registry are in the box. The same is true for deploying our images to your cluster.

When I first learned about Container Orchestration I was intimidated, but with Azure and Team Services I now feel empowered.

One thing, though: If possible, please edit to explicitly state that Kubernetes is often abbreviated K8S or K8. I hadn't heard it called K8 until today, so I had to Google a bit to find out what K8 was. (There also seems to be disagreement over whether to shorten it to K8 or K8S.)